Ahead of UFC 160, the toughest fight might be between Donald Cerrone's ears

Greg Jackson didn’t see the video before it got pulled from YouTube, but he didn’t have to. When it came to Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone’s fight with Nate Diaz at UFC 141, the famed MMA trainer remembered what he screamed at Cerrone without the benefit of a video with the audio feed from their corner that night to remind him.

“I think I yelled at him a bunch to go forward that night,” Jackson told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com).

By a bunch, he means 11 consecutive times at one point. With time draining away in the fight and Cerrone failing to pull the trigger, Jackson repeated the mantra – “Go forward! Be first!” – until it should have been seared in the brain of everyone within earshot.

Still, Cerrone couldn’t get going against Diaz. On the video, Jackson can be heard lamenting the fact that his fighter had “fought too many times this year.” He still thinks that was the case – it was, after all, Cerrone’s fifth fight for the UFC in 2011. Cerrone disagrees.

“That’s just Greg being political, making excuses on my behalf for why we lost,” Cerrone said. “I don’t think I fought too many times. Fighting, I love it. That’s what I like to do. I’d fight every weekend if I could.”

To hear Cerrone tell it, the fact that he can’t fight every weekend is actually kind of the problem. That makes the few times each year he does get to fight even more stressful, more difficult to deal with on a psychological level, which he thinks might have a lot to do with his recent losses. That’s why he started seeing a sport psychologist recently, he said. After his first-round TKO loss to Anthony Pettis in January, Cerrone (19-5 MMA, 6-2 UFC) knew he had to do something different to be mentally prepared for his main-card fight against Strikeforce import K.J. Noons (11-6 MMA, 0-0 UFC) at UFC 160 on Saturday night at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

“It’s trying to figure out, what do I do in the cage that I don’t do in training?” Cerrone said. “Because in training, I don’t lose a round. If one of my past [opponents] that defeated me, like (Nate) Diaz or (Anthony) Pettis came down to Jackson’s [MMA gym] on training day? Without a doubt in my mind I’d take them. Then I get there in the cage and the lights, and fighting is so hard. It’s like, you get into a confrontation at a stoplight, get out and fight a guy on the street, yeah, that’s one thing. But having six months to plan and think? I go to bed next to my girl, and I’m thinking about a dude. All that time messes up your mind.”

It’s funny, most fans probably wouldn’t regard Cerrone as the kind of guy who over-thinks his fights. His style tends to be fairly simple. He’s aggressive and straightforward and unrelenting – except for when he isn’t.

Jackson still thinks the Diaz loss was a result of burnout (“It’s not the fight itself,” he said. “I don’t know if people understand how grinding a real good camp is, where you’re doing good work and peaking correctly and it’s just really intense”), but he’s all for his fighters seeing sports psychologists to help them work through their mental issues, especially since he’s seen enough of this sport to know that a psychological problem can derail a career if it isn’t dealt with.

“It’s like writer’s block; I call it fighter’s block,” Jackson said. “When you know you have the potential for performance but you’re not able to enact it when the time comes, it’s usually because of a lot of baggage that you bring in to the experience. … What we’re looking for with ‘Cowboy’ is fighting with a lot of pressure, but staying calm. He also usually has to get hit first, has to have the other guy really engage him before he can get going, and we’re looking to eliminate that.”

For Cerrone, part of it might have to do with the pressure he puts on himself to not only win, but win in exciting fashion. That seems so wrapped up in his own concept of himself as a fighter that he can’t imagine any other way.

“Never in my career am I going to get booed,” Cerrone said. “Absolutely not. If my coach told me, ‘Listen, we need to take this guy down and hold him there for the round and win this fight,’ I’d tell him, ‘Hey, after this fight you’re going to be looking for a new job.’ My style is to go out there and throw down. That’s what I get paid to do: put on a show and be entertaining.”

It’s just that, with so much time to sit and dwell on it, the job can wear on you.

“You start thinking about what could go wrong,” Cerrone said. “… I have to remind myself, I don’t have to go to the gym and train; I get to go. I could work a 9-to-5 job. I could go bus tables for a living. But no, I get to go train for a living. It’s just a matter of reminding myself why.”

Against Noons, he’ll get a perfect opportunity to find out if his new approach to the mental game is working. At the same time, he already knows what the UFC was thinking when it matched the two of them up together to kick off the main card. There’s an expectation there, an anticipation of a certain kind of fight.

“They don’t put you on the pay-per-view card because they think you’re going to be a boring fight,” Cerrone said.

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